The Soul of the Parish is Making

September 10, 2010

The soul of the parish is making: crafting a world to work, pray, and live in.

The soul of the parish is making. I propose that we put our parishes to work making something: bicycles, plates, shoes, beer, miracles, something tangible, anything local.  The parish does not need to worry about competing with China, but can offer something of real quality and the added value of local origin, "the work of human hands.” Built to serve the working classes, inner-city parishes can become home to small-scale workshops that manufacture for local markets. 

Consumer savvy and the growing demand for sustainably produced goods and fair-trade dovetail with a burgeoning taste for the local: locally grown food, locally produced goods.  Particularly in the inner city, parishes have the space and the human resources to manufacture.  The parish as manufacturer could—and would—support its community in both body and soul.

The ancient Pauline and Benedictine traditions teach us that the church can—and should--make and sell goods to avoid burdening the faithful with the increasingly difficult task of supporting themselves elsewhere in the community.  Paul made tents and Benedict ordered his monks to earn their own living, which they still do in very material ways: from the traditional cheese, beer, bread, wool, cloth, and wine to contemporary printing cartridges, high-end moisturizers, and custom coffins.  The medieval notion of the benefice—a parish that produces a good to support the parish—was often abused in church history, but still holds the promise of becoming a significant generator of Western Christian culture and properly ordered wealth in our day.

Arguably, there is an even greater pastoral than financial need for the parish to become a manufacturer. On the one hand, creating opportunities for satifying and dignified manual labor makes economic sense. Just consider the proliferation of small farms and wineries. The boom in knitting also speaks volumes.  But more than revenue is at stake. The labor involved in producing a knitted garment, for example, almost always exceeds its economic value..  But something in the work articulates the soul. Economically and culturally, there is a crying need to produce that which reveals—and touches—the soul.

The soul of the parish is making. Henry Nouwen spoke of the importance of tedious work in his life, describing the pleasure he found in the chore of stuffing envelopes at a table with coworkers in preparation for publishing one of his many books. The work made him reflect on all that goes into conceiving, writing, editing and finally publishing a book. The material world warrants soup to nuts attention.

The planting of the hops vine requires two to three years to mature its root system before high jumping over a trellis. The green cones of fresh plant origami are the inexpensive yet priceless ingredients in beer-making that promise to summon back to the table the lost male quotient of the community of the faithful. With the majority of America’s ethnic make-up still of German descent, it doesn’t take a chemist to figure out this winning recipe. Beer costs about 25 cents per 12 oz serving to make. Upstate New York was scored with trellises for hops from colonial times well into the 19th century. Many rural parishes have unused and arable land that could be converted to grow vines, and not much land is needed.

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Count Levin chooses to live on his country estate and work alongside the field hands gathering wheat. In his supine ecstasy at harvest time, lying on his back at midday in exhaustion and mirth, he confronts the spiritual dangers of being “liberated” from manual work. He is an idealist pining to be human again, tuned into his fellow human beings, fixed to the earth and to time. Meaningful communal work makes life surge in him. From Thoreau and Rushkin to Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being and the philosophy of Wendell Berry, it is clear that the unmooring of our fundamental anthropological bearings is an existential problem that cannot be healed by any immanent science. It is a paradox that the heavenly side of being human requires earth. We all long to be more fully human. When science tempts us to abandon humility (derived from the Greek for earth) in accepting the limiting terms of life we risk becoming monsters rather than angels. Transcendence isn’t as easy as an elevator ride. It requires work to ascend to the liberation of knowledge.

Unfortunately, we have jettisoned the relationship between making and cognition, as Matthew Crawford notes in Shop Class as Soulcraft.  He offers the example of a wheelwright and an assembly line worker. The wheelwright reads the variations of crude wood into the invisible finesse of a trued wheel. The assembly line worker is only a cog in the wheel. The less he knows the better, because managing mechanistic production by dumbing down the worker widens the margin of profit. Making the worker dumb and making the engineer rich is a rule of thumb in cubicle farms too. No job is safe.

The soul of the parish is making. Bread and wine becoming the body and blood is also a form of making. Awareness of the literalness of the offering is often lost. Witness the scramble to gather the offertory gifts, which can seem like a ritualistic afterthought: “You know, I think you forgot these.” But “fruit of the vine and work of human hands” can, and would, be more emphatic if you had the actual vines and hands to make it in the first place. I know many pairs of clerical eyes will roll at the suggestion of another round of homemade altar bread, and I can appreciate that the church must protect the sacredness of the bread-made-body ritual. At the same time, the community that makes the bread and the wine that is to be transformed and consumed is also a community more appreciative and awed by the mystery of that bread and wine becoming the body and blood of the resurrected Christ.  

On Labor Day, a commercial from the AFL/CIO’s local New York chapter paid homage to the fruits of the labor movement. Workers with heavy authentic Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx accents claimed that we “have the union to thank for the weekend” and we “have the union to thank for workman’s comp” and we “have the union to thank for the 40-hour workweek.” The blessings are considerable, but it reminded me of a sort of Maginot Line, separating the call to productive work from the need for leisure. 

The ad also feebly demanded that the listener take for granted there are legions of unionized factory workers in the tri-state area. In fact, unions are the province of monopolistic service industries: actors, firefighters, law enforcement, teachers, nurses, porters, sanitation workers.  These aren't workers who make anything tangible.  I am not suggesting that they do not do anything good and worthwhile, but they do not make anything.  Neither does the banker. The jobs that fuel substantial pay are more often than not derivative: investment and financial sector jobs.

The soul of the parish is making. Making room in a parish structure to make something creates a local arbiter of value. In the same way that you value the man who chops the wood and feeds the home fire because you connect feeling warm to feeling gratitude for him who makes the fire, tangible links to the production of our basic necessities opens our minds and hearts to the language of gratitude that is the heart of the Eucharist. 

To be sure, we don’t need anyone to chop wood for us, but the reinvention of a relationship with the very origin of a product—as worker or consumer, or even both—could be the basis of a communal prayer bringing about the healing of fractured ethnicity and identity that came about as a result of mobility and exogamous marriage.The material sign of the local, the handmade marked by the humble honor of craft, points the way home for many who often have no way of articulating their rootlessness.  Interdependence is more palatable now that a college graduate can easily rack up a 100K debt for a Bachelor’s degree that was supposed to ensure financial independence.  A local parish as a place to live, work, and pray offers, potentially, a holistic environment to develop new communal structures that can modify consumer appetites and habits.

The soul of the parish is making. My experiment with Goods of Conscience, a line of sustainably produced apparel made in a Bronx parish, is based on this tradition of the parish benefice, based on a model learned that Msgr. Greg Shaffer, a Maryknoll priest established in San Lucas Toliman in Guatemala. His parish produces coffee and honey sold directly to customers in the United States through the mission based in New Ulm, Minnesota.  Interestingly, in Spanish the processing plant for coffee is called a beneficio. The San Lucas beneficio has been of sufficient success to finance the construction of a parish clinic and has attracted a stream of volunteers from the United States to add expertise to local forestry initiatives. 

Some American parishes dabble in T-shirts and cause-related goods, but this is more of a reflection of affluence and leisure than necessity. These ventures are not brave enough. We need to begin living in a new way tapping into our ancient beliefs and practices: making something out of little or nothing, building sacred dependency on one another, imbuing the ordinary desiderata of life with intelligence and the savor of love. The era of production on-demand and the desire to make on the part of the full spectrum of socio-economic backgrounds in the United States makes this a moment of possibility for parish-based benefices. The soul of the parish is making.

Fr. Andrew O’Connor

Founder 

Goods of Conscience

September 11, 2010

Bronx, New York